How Private Charity Can Help the Homeless

H omelessness is a problem to which big city Democrats have recently devoted great attention and resources. Street conditions remain poor, though, and some may wonder whether private philanthropy can make headway where the public sector has failed.

Donors looking to make a dent in the homelessness problem should first focus on talent. The best leaders of homelessness programs serve on both the front lines and the front pages. Figures such as Reverend Andy Bales, the recently retired head of Los Angeles’ Union Rescue Mission, use their hard-won street cred to vouch for bourgeois values. Not everyone can pull that off. Many program leaders stay out of the headlines, either out of a sense of Christian humility, because navigating the daily chaos in their programs is consuming enough, or because they need to remain on speaking terms with the powers that be in their communities. But someone needs to speak up on behalf of work and sobriety. Homelessness-nonprofit CEOs passionate about bourgeois values used to be more common. Philanthropy should bolster their ranks.

Talented leaders aren’t always available where you want them. The American homeless-services landscape features a mismatch between talent and opportunity. New York City, in various poverty-related sectors, has talent to burn. Leaders like Geoffrey Canada and Eva Moskowitz could have succeeded in any profession but chose to tackle a pressing social challenge. But many philanthropists will find it hard to make a difference in homelessness in New York, at present, because the billions the city government spends annually on that problem crowd out private innovations.

Most U.S. communities don’t spend anywhere near as much as New York does on homelessness, so such crowding out is less a barrier to philanthropic dynamism than talent is. In the typical small- or middle-sized U.S. city, ambitious strivers tend not to aspire towards running a shelter. Talent and opportunity do sometimes align, however, and that is the sweet spot for philanthropy. Two examples would be the Life Learning Center in Covington, Ky. and Haven for Hope in San Antonio. Those programs were launched by wealthy individuals whose influence and resources persuaded various public agencies to partner with them. Personal engagement — the willingness to bargain and twist arms — will always reap more success than cutting checks alone.

The main choice philanthropists interested in homelessness face is whether to back policy change or direct-service providers. Supporting your local shelter has the advantage of targeting your help to directly alleviate need and suffering. Promising providers worth supporting, other than shelters, include outreach organizations. We Heart Seattle, Metro Relief in the Dallas area, and Better Way Detroit are scrappy groups that hit the streets to help homeless adults find work, get their vital documents in order, and navigate damnably bureaucratic welfare agencies. We also have a great need for programs for men organized around values such as pride and self-reliance. Therapeutic culture does not offer the sole solution to upward mobility.

Supporting direct services won’t necessarily change the status quo on homelessness, though. That will require dislodging the dominant progressive regime that overemphasizes redistribution and underemphasizes rehabilitation. Donors can change that by backing politicians who not only have the right principles on homelessness but who prioritize the issue. Progressives’ current dominance of the issue was facilitated by years of conservative neglect.

Another way to bring change is through public-interest litigation, a tactic pioneered by left-wingers but recently deployed to clean up the streets in Portland, Ore., and Phoenix. Moving even farther upstream, higher-education reform, an exciting area for many right-leaning philanthropists, has overlooked social work. In order to develop better homeless-services leaders, we will need more social-work programs unaligned with progressive ideology than now exist on college campuses.

In The Republic, Plato says that those we most want to give political power to are the men least likely to pursue it. Funding social-services nonprofits is a bit like that. Many admirable faith-based homelessness programs reject government support, wary of the conditions that may be attached to that aid. But private charity can’t go it alone; homeless policy must function as a public–private partnership. Government wields powers — over arrest, involuntary civil commitment, and land use — that are indispensable for sound homeless policy-making. Moreover, we don’t want a bifurcated system to develop wherein anyone interested in values such as work and sobriety gets sent to charity, whereas government programs are for those looking for the dole.

Working with troubled populations is not for everyone. Philanthropists who had highly successful business careers may need to readjust their tolerance for failure if they set themselves to helping the homeless. But there is opportunity. For many big-city centrists, homelessness stands as the 21st-century equivalent of the post-’60s crime wave: a mugged-by-reality experience that’s forced them to question their political allegiances. Progressive governance has been unable to deliver normalcy, defined as a city in which fatal-overdose records are not broken every year, retail theft is not rampant, and tent cities aren’t seen around every corner. That is the legacy of progressives’ ownership and conservatives’ neglect of homelessness policy, and it is not pretty.